Hifishark Terms and Conditions of Use

Last updated: October 03, 2024

Welcome to the Hifishark.com website!

In the following we will use the term Hifishark to denote Hifishark.com as well as any and all Services offered by Hifishark.com.

This document describes our Terms and Conditions of Use. By using Hifishark you accept and agree to these terms and conditions. Just as we may change or extend Hifishark at any time, we may also revise our Terms and Conditions of Use and make changes to this document. At any given time, your use of Hifishark means that you accept and agree to the most recent Terms and Conditions of Use as described by this document.

Content Types and Ownership

Some parts of Hifishark, like search results and product or manufacturer pages, are accessible to everyone. Other parts are only accessible when you hold an account, a User Profile, with us.

In the following we distinguish between Public Content, that is shown to everyone, and Private Content, that is associated with your User Profile and shown only to you.

Public Content comprises everything on Hifishark that is visible to everyone. This includes content provided by us, like search results, product information, etc., as well as content contributed to the community by you, such as for-sale listings, questions & answers, reviews, product pictures, product descriptions, etc. Note, that any such contribution also makes your username Public Content.

Private Content comprises everything that is only visible to you. This includes your email address, password, registered agents, registered product relationships, registered favourite listings, etc.

By using Hifishark you grant us an irrevocable, non-exclusive, world-wide, royalty-free license (including the right to sub-license) to use, copy, modify, publish and share any Public Content that you contribute while doing so and to allow any third-party to do the same. This does not extend to your Private Content that remains under your full control.

If you decide to close your User Profile on Hifishark we are free to keep your contributed Public Content online for as long as we like. In contrast, your Private Content will be deleted along with your User Profile.

License of Use

You must follow the policies laid out to you in this document. We may terminate your User Profile and take steps to prevent you from using Hifishark if you violate our Terms and Conditions of Use, and supend you User Profile if we are investigating suspected misconduct.

You must be over 16 years of age in order to use Hifishark.

All Content of Hifishark is protected by copyright. All proprietary rights in the Public Content are owned by us, our users, or our partner sites. It is prohibited to copy, modify, publish or share any Public Content from Hifishark for any purpose without explicit consent from us or the owner.

Being the owner, you are free to use any content, that you personally contributed to Hifishark, elsewhere, provided that this usage does not compromise the security of any user account on Hifishark. Also feel free to summarise or discuss any Public Content on other websites or across social media, but please provide a link back to the original material.

When using Hifishark your behaviour and contributions must be in compliance with any and all relevant laws and regulations that apply in your region. Please respect the copyright of others and refrain from insulting or damaging behaviour, including fraud.

We reserve the right to permanently remove any Public Content you may have contributed to Hifishark in response to DMCA takedown notices, or other reports of copyright violation, without your prior consent.

Limitations

We encourage and promote the individual responsibility of our users. Specifically, we are not liable for any damages or losses suffered from the use of information provided by Hifishark. Our goal is to provide a complete picture of the global availability of for-sale Hifi gear. However, the harsh reality of the Internet is, that you cannot know the identity or intentions of other online users, and it is not possible for us to verify the legitimacy of every single listing.

Errors may occur on Hifishark. This can be technical errors in the system itself, or omissions/errors in content. We put in our best effort to prevent this from happening, but occasionally it will. If you come across such an error, please let us know and we will fix it as soon as possible. Note, that we are not liable for any damages or losses suffered from such errors or omissions. Note in particular, that we cannot guarantee that out indexing of any given site is perfect, and that our coverage of their listings may therefore be incomplete from time to time.

Links to other sites is a main part of our Public Content. All links are intended to be relevant and worthwhile in the context they appear, but for any given link we cannot guarantee that the linked content is appropriate or relevant, or even that the link is still valid. The internet is a hight dynamic environment, and things change.

When you follow links from Hifishark to visit third-party websites, then such sites constitute separate jurisdictions in regards to terms & conditions of use. Hifishark is not liable for any collection or use of data, personal or not, undertaken by such third-party sites and it is your own responsibility to familiarize yourself with their policies in this regard.

Emails from Hifishark

In general we will never send you emails about any subject that you have not specifically subscribed to. Examples of subjects that you can subscribe to includes, but is not limited to, registration confirmation mails, newsletters, search agent notifications, questions & answers notifications, and support cases raised by you. In all such cases you must explicitly give your consent via some obvious mechanism on Hifishark, and there will be a dedicated page where you can systematically and easily withdraw your consent.

In case of very important changes, e.g. to this document, or events we may break this promise and notify you by email, but it will be the exception and not the rule.

Privacy Policy

We take your internet privacy seriously. In order to protect it, we adhere to the following policy regarding the collection, use, and dissemination of your information. We will not wilfully use, or share your information with anyone, except as described in this policy.

As we develop our business and offer more or different services, we may have to change our privacy policy accordingly. In such cases the changes will be posted on this page, and you will be notified by email. Policy changes will be effective immediately upon posting, and the corresponding technical changes may come into effect at any time thereafter.

What is collected and why?

The primary goal of data collection at Hifishark is to deliver well-functioning and attractive services to our users and to allow third-party providers to do the same. Beyond this goal only the requirements imposed by Danish or European Law are considered.

User provided data

Some facets of Hifishark require the existence of a virtual persona, a User Profile, to serve as a link to your real persona, the User. A User Profile may be established by the association of a Social Network Account (SNA) from either Google.com or Facebook.com, in which case we store the corresponding SNA id, a unique derivative of the SNA username, and the associated email address for future use. Alternatively, a User Profile may be created by the submission of a username, a validated email account, and a password, which we then store for future use. Besides the username, which will be visible to other users of Hifishark in case you contribute Public Content and is therefore itself considered Public Content, this information remains private and is safeguarded by state of the art security measures.

Once you have a User Profile, you may chose to provide us further information in order to customise Hifishark. You may, e.g., store search and display preferences, subscribe to search agent email notifications, mark listings of interest for future reference, or accumulate a list of products that you owned, own, or intend to own. Your search and display preferences are stored locally on your computer in cookies. The remaining information qualifies as Private Content and is stored in association with your User Profile for your convenience, but it is never shared with, or displayed to, any third-party.

For every type of Private Content we provide an overview page where you can easily see what data we hold for you and change/delete this data:

A User Profile will also allow you to contribute Public Content to Hifishark for the consumption of the community. You may, e.g., post questions or answers in relation to products or contribute product images or descriptions. Such Public Content will be displayed in the appropriate context and can be seen by all present and future users of Hifishark.

It is generally possible to change and/or delete public content from the page where it was originally created:

Data Deletion - Your right to be forgotten

Id you decide to delete your User Profile using our Profile Delete page all of your private data will be permanently deleted from Hifishark.com.

In case you have contributed valuable public content we hope that you will allow us to keep it and continue to display it in an anonymized form. If not, then please check the 'Delete Public Content' checkbox when you delete your profile. If you do this, all public content ever contributed by you will be permanently deleted.

Automatically collected data

We log the outcome of every page access on Hifishark. We do this in order to detect abuse and errors. The logged data is not systematically associated with your User Profile, but may be taken into account when reported errors are analysed. The logged data will never willfully be shared with any third-party.

We use Google Analytics to help us collect and analyse anonymous information about the use of hifishark. In doing so, we do not transfer any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to Google. Google Analytics relies on IP information to estimate the geographical location of our user base. However, we only send them anonymised IP information, thereby making it impossible to link the information to you. You can opt out of our Google Analytics data collection by using the tools available here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/

Children, privacy, and consent

Hfishark is reserved for people older than 16. We will not willfully collect, store, or share Personally Identifiable Information, or any other kind of data, from any person younger than 16 years of age.

Advertising

Hifishark participates in the Google AdSense advertisement network. This means that:

For users outside the European Economic Area (EEA) third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to Hifishark or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies also enables it and its partners to serve ads to users of Hifishark based on their visit to Hifishark and/or other sites on the Internet.

For users in the EEA third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to control the display of non-personalized ads suitable for the general audience of Hifishark. Although these ads don’t use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.

Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ad Settings.

California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”)

Under CCPA, Californian residents have the right to declare their preferences on the sale of data for advertising and marketing purposes. If you wish to change your preferences, click this link to launch our preference portal:

We use a third-party to provide monetisation technologies for our site. You can review their privacy and cookie policy at https://publift.com/privacy-policy/.

Cookies

In order to facilitate your user experience we use a mixture of session cookies (that are never stored on your computer) and persistent cookies (that stay on your computer for a predefined amount of time).

Some cookies are necessary to make the site work:

Some cookies store your preferences for your convenience:

Some cookies support the collection of site statistics (Google Analytics):

We allow Google AdSense to set cookies related to Targeting & Advertising as described in the section on privacy. Further information can be found at: https://policies.google.com/?hl=en

Other than the cookies related to Google AdSense, none of the used cookies store Personally Identifiable Information. For users residing in the European Economic Area the cookies related to Google AdSense store no Personally Identifiable Information.

Governing Law

These Terms and Conditions of Use and the associated legal relations between Hifishark and you shall be governed by the laws of Denmark and the European Union. Any dispute arising directly or indirectly out of these Terms and Conditions of Use shall come under the jurisdiction of the Danish court system.

Forced Disclosure

Note, that Hifishark is subject to current and/or future laws of Denmark and the European Union. As such, we may not be able to ensure that none of your private communications and other personally identifiable information will ever be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy, e.g. as part of legal investigations.

Further note, that even the strong security measures we have in place cannot ensure or warrant the security of your information or provide absolute guarantee against disclosure or loss due to a breach of these measures.